Reducing Maternal and Child Undernutrition

The goal of the project is to reduce illness and death due to undernutrition among children and mothers in northern Ghana. The project aims to increase the support available within communities for treating malnutrition and improving nutrition among the most vulnerable populations of northern Ghana. The project activities include training and equipping frontline health workers to treat severely malnourished children; training community volunteers to identify the early stages of severe acute malnutrition and to refer patients for treatment; training community volunteers and local organizations to promote local nutritious foods; and providing information on good feeding practices for infants and young children. To ensure that the expanded support for nutrition is sustainable and to help reduce the number of children facing undernutrition in the long term the project helps the Government of Ghana develop and implement a strong and coherent national nutrition policy. The project also includes developing a gender-sensitive nutrition surveillance system in the three northern regions to help the government and development partners improve nutrition programs decision-making and timely response in those regions.

The expected intermediate outcomes for this project include: (1) improved treatment and prevention of undernutrition for boys and girls under five years of age and for mothers; (2) improved financial support gender-sensitive policy coherence and coordination in the nutrition sector; and (3) improved monitoring of nutritional indicators and improved decision making for better nutritional outcomes.